Babson Strategy – Version 2.1, May 2009
Executive Summary
A New Vision for the College
- Our mission is to educate a generation of leaders who create great economic and social value ... everywhere;
- To do so, we want to be the preeminent institution for entrepreneurial thought and action—and known for it;
- We want to embrace people, planet and profit issues simultaneously, not sequentially;
- We want to extend our global reach to have an impact on the world;
- We want to create a diverse, multi-cultural and inclusive community of highly talented students, faculty and staff; and
- We want to be prosperous and sustainable, with ample resources for our work.
Why is this vision right and compelling for Babson today? The world we teach in and educate students for has changed in significant ways. The current global financial and economic crisis has made it clear that many of the traditional ways of conducting business run the risk of no longer being relevant. The operating models taught at business schools were predicated on three key assumptions that are now in a state of flux—easy access to credit, cheap availability of energy, and an abundant supply of skilled labor at low cost.
Students need to learn how to think and act differently in an environment where the underlying logics have changed dramatically and will continue to change rapidly. This is the role of entrepreneurial learning—to learn in real time, and adapt as conditions change and results emerge. Moreover, it is increasingly clear that economic value has become an inadequate outcome measure of performance. Business schools like Babson have an obligation beyond assisting our students to build better businesses. We must educate them to build a better world.
This need for entrepreneurial thinking and action on all fronts plays to Babson’s strategic advantage. The world wants entrepreneurial solutions and leaders who can create them. With our long established leadership in entrepreneurship and with an embedded liberal arts faculty, who is better prepared to provide these solutions and educate these leaders than our College? This is our moment—and we have to seize it.
A New Mission for the College
- Educate a generation of leaders who create great economic and social value ... everywhere;
A central tenet of our new mission is that entrepreneurial thinking extends beyond the boundaries of traditional business organizations. We educate future leaders—some of these leaders may choose to start new businesses, others may participate in family businesses, some may create new products and processes within existing organizations, and still others may engage in a new social venture, service, or movement.
Babson Strategy - Pre-2009
In the late 1970s, Babson leadership adopted entrepreneurship as a point of differentiation from other business schools. Fifteen years later, Babson came to be recognized as one of the leaders in the discipline of entrepreneurship. At this point, Babson also began to focus on curriculum innovation. The result was the creation of integrated cross-disciplinary graduate and undergraduate programs marked by a focus on experiential learning. At the end of the 1990s, Babson started to reach out globally, and a number of partnership agreements were signed with schools across the world.
While our current strategy has been successful, it was conceived and executed in a very different business school environment, which has changed in three significant ways. First, Babson’s leadership position in entrepreneurship as a discipline and curriculum innovation is being publicly challenged by other more prosperous schools such as MIT, Indiana, Stanford, and USC. These schools have been investing and growing their entrepreneurship departments. The strategic challenge this poses is: How do we respond to the challenges by other leading business schools to our leadership in entrepreneurship and curriculum innovation?
Second, the economic environment has shifted drastically—and critics point to the absence of ethics and the blatant disregard for societal good that seems to have been the hallmark of many business school graduates working in the major financial institutions. There are increasing calls for business schools to teach their graduates more than how to make profits and maximize shareholder wealth. And there is an increased emphasis on the role of business in fostering the common good and following ethical practices. The second challenge facing Babson is: How do we build a curriculum that emphasizes sustainable practices and the common good alongside profit maximization and shareholder wealth creation?
Finally, a side effect of the economic crisis has been the significant decline in college endowments, alongside a diminishing student pipeline for private colleges and increasing student populations at public institutions. The cost of education has risen to the point where it is increasingly difficult to gain incremental net income from price increases due to countervailing pressures for financial aid. The last strategic challenge is: How do we build a sustainable financial model for the College that ensures long-term prosperity?
Babson Strategy – 2009
The Babson Strategy for 2009 and beyond redefines the three historical pillars of entrepreneurship, curriculum integration, and global outreach. The 2009 strategy is a call to:
1. Extend our leadership in entrepreneurship by moving from entrepreneurship-the-discipline to the more pervasive entrepreneurial thought and action.
We believe that we can build, refine, and brand a curriculum that capitalizes on the concept of entrepreneurial thought and action by building on the differences between managerial and entrepreneurial modes of thought, and teaching how and when to use each.
Entrepreneurs often think and act quite differently from managers. For example, while most managers rely on causal logic and build plans to deal with uncertainty, many entrepreneurs control uncertainty by acting directly upon it. Within a loosely-defined general direction, they focus on what to do next and worry less about what they ought to do in some ultimate sense. They use quick action to test what works and make modifications as they go. Managers generally think about what they ought to do; entrepreneurs often focus on what they can do. Not only do the entrepreneurs think differently from managers, they also act differently. Rather than find opportunities, entrepreneurs often make opportunities.
The content of most business programs is built on the logic of what every manager needs to know. This framework leads to a causally-oriented curriculum that emphasizes the following questions:
- What is the problem?
- What analysis needs to be performed?
- What results do I expect?
- What actions do I need to take based on the analysis?
Entrepreneurial thought and action uses “effectual” logic that is based on asking the following four questions:
- Who am I (my identity as shaped by culture and context, skills, and abilities)?
- What do I know (my knowledge and training)?
- Whom do I know (my professional and social network)?
- How do I bring together these three elements into a network of participants who can co-create an opportunity?
By teaching both causal and effectual action logics, we can build a generation of ambidextrous practitioners, able to display understanding and behavior associated with each approach at the appropriate time. Using the concept of entrepreneurial thought and action, we can build a curriculum that provides a rationale for what we do, validates much of what we have in place, and differentiates us from other business schools in a powerful fashion.
2. Cement our lead in curriculum innovation by designing the “next generation” curriculum that integrates profit and the common good.
We propose to extend our expertise in curriculum innovation to take into account that business solutions must not only generate profits, they must be sustainable and meet desired social objectives. The current economic crisis has taught us that it is simply inadequate to focus on generating profits without regard to how those profits are being generated. Business school curricula, often unwittingly, have contributed to the notion that success in business comes before an organization can address social causes by establishing a philanthropic foundation.
The UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) that a number of schools, including Babson, have endorsed provide us with a powerful base to build upon. Our students have demonstrated a strong interest in this shift to responsible management. A large number of faculty have self identified their interest in this shift as well. There appears to be a significant opportunity to develop our pedagogy in such a way that these issues, which are largely out of the mainstream curricular matters in other business schools, become core in our curriculum.
The Lewis Foundation gift of $10.8 million to create a campus focused on responsible management principles provides us with a tangible start to extend our work beyond the traditional conceptual boundaries of business.
3. Expand our global reach from limited relationships to deeper strategic relationships through a network of global partnerships.
These relationships would form a “global entrepreneurship education network” (GEEN) that disseminates Babson pedagogy, research, and practice across the globe through alliances, strategic partnerships and, in some cases, a physical presence. These partnerships also provide the prospect of significant incremental revenue growth.
The key drivers of GEEN are the need to: (1) provide our students with a truly global educational experience; and (2) establish global presence and recognition for Babson as the world’s leader in entrepreneurial thought and action and curriculum innovation. The global strategy, therefore, is a complement to the two other pillars of our strategy—leadership in developing entrepreneurial thought and action and curriculum innovation and integration. It provides the vehicle for disseminating our curricular innovations across the globe, helping us to achieve recognition for our efforts.
Conclusion
When implemented, our strategy will:
- Provide Babson with a unique position in the arena of business education;
- Create a niche that is greatly in demand;
- Capitalize on our existing brand in entrepreneurship;
- Use our strength in innovative pedagogy and curriculum to maintain our leadership in that area;
- Provide us with a powerful message based on a few key ideas that will appeal to large-scale philanthropists; and
- Generate the resources we need to document, disseminate, and renew our work.
When executed, the strategy should help us build a prosperous financial future by attracting funds from all the sources we are targeting—more students, more partnerships, and more giving. Whether you are a Babson College student, parent, alumnus(a), faculty, staff, or governance member, the fulfillment of this vision matters enormously. It will strengthen Babson’s academic reputation, increase the value of a Babson degree, enhance membership in the Babson community, and provide a great place to connect with for life.